Make no mistake, I’m looking for a teaching job with the Bayonne Board of Education. If Mayor Mark Smith is reelected, I might get an 8 percent raise over current rates, whereas if Jimmy Davis heads to City Hall I’m looking at a bump up of 17.9 percent. As a man of considerable cultural attainment I am entitled to a life of leisure and bourgeois comfort. You needn’t be as bright as Hans Urs von Balthasar to know how I’m going to vote in the runoff. With a Davis-enhanced salary I’ll be able to afford both a cottage in Belmar and a rustic retreat on leafy Greenwood Lake. Does Assemblyman Jason O’Donnell really expect me, with my fair Irish-American complexion, to spend every weekend and personal day under the direct glare of the sun at the Jersey Shore? I need to alternate those getaways with sick days and such in a green and shady grove. Does Jason want to give me skin cancer? And don’t carp to me about the $1,100 average increase that Bayonne property taxpayers will have to pony up. The handful of academics clustered around the Smith campaign prattle on about the bonum commune, the common good. How antiquated. They’re living in the Middle Ages with Thomas Aquinas. They fail to realize that in postmodernity all their cherished metanarratives have collapsed. We cutting edge thinkers know that the only bonum left standing is the bonum particulare, the individual good. To those cheapskates who would begrudge me my ticket into the fair courts of life, I say count your blessings, think of the poor folk in Africa. And if you can’t follow the above philosophical reasoning in Latin, well, go get yourself a Master’s Degree, and then come back and talk to me. It may just be that you’re one of what socialite Leona Helmsley called “the little people.”

And did you see where former mayoral candidate Anthony Zanowic endorsed Mayor Mark Smith? Zanowic is a notorious conservative whose middle name is frugality, the opposite of big- government types like former Governor Jim Florio and President Obama. With him whispering into Mayor Smith’s ear the bottom could conceivably fall out of local property taxes. How vertiginous would that be? Taxes going down? The last thing I need is to be shelling out my Obamacare deductible to purchase some drug to combat vertigo. As the good nuns used to tell us, “A word to the wise is sufficient.”